This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those “liberals” who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
TodayÂ’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they canÂ’t read them either.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
If we succeed in cleaning up the environment, we donÂ’t have enough money for war. But Americans are basically pro-war. WeÂ’re a violent people and we like it.
Who knows but life be that which men call death, and death what men call life?
Who so neglects learning in his youth loses the past and is dead to the future.
Even disasters violent that infect humans infect fatigue after a while, and donations winds do not retain strongly always, it is impossible to endure if lucky forever, since all things are changing and exchange positions with each other, the best men trusts constantly in the hopes, and despair vulnerable.
The violent desire of pleasing in the person reproved, may otherwise change into a despair of doing it, while he finds himself censured for faults he is not conscious of. A mind that is softened and humanized by friendship cannot bear frequent reproaches; either it must sink under the oppression, or abate considerably of the value and esteem it had for him who bestows them.
I confess my extreme embarrassment: I do not know in what capacity I was asked to talk about him, that for many years I live far away from what Anatole France called the city of the books, I who for many years (and through no fault of my own) do not I have only one book on the shelf of Benedetto Croce and I do my work on the ground floor, away from the upper echelons of philosophy and scholarly criticism. Benedetto Croce I met, I met him several times in Florence before the last war, when to ask to see him and talk to him was not devoid of some inconvenience. I think it was Bonciani the hotel and later in the house of Luigi Russo . And the other two times I have visited the Cross, in Naples, in his house, in the last years of his life.
The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough. He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.
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